Screening

Two evenings of special screenings introduce The Greenroom, a large-scale exhibition exploring the “documentary turn” within recent contemporary art practice and its heritage in relation to the history of film, documentary photography, and television. Set to open in Fall 2008 at the The Hessel Museum and Center for Curatorial Studies Galleries (Bard College), The Greenroom, curated by CCS Program Director Maria Lind, will feature works by more than forty artists and extend beyond the exhibition format to include a long-term research project and related publications.

The research project is a collaboration between The Center for Curatorial Studies, Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College, and the artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl.

These preview screenings, organized by curatorial assistant Fionn Meade, include selected works from artists participating in The Greenroom exhibition.

Selections from The Greenroom
Program 2

Anri Sala, Dammi I Colori (2003, 16 minutes)
Dammi I Colori accompanies artist and Mayor Edi Rama on a slow tour of Tirana, attentive to Ramas ongoing narration as the camera visits various projects throughout the city that attempt to offer a new direction for its residents, including the geometrical painting in rich and primary colors of various housing complexes in the most impoverished areas.

Harun Farocki, Workers Leave the Factory (1995, 36 minutes)
Workers Leaving the Factory was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurry out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. But where are they rushing? In his documentary essay, Harun Farocki explores variations upon this scene right through the history of film, exploring how the space before the factory gates has always been the scene of contested social conflicts and narratives.

Hito Steyerl, November (2004, 25 minutes)
A short film loosely based on the life of Steyerl’s close friend, Andrea Wolf, who, prior to her assassination as a suspected Kurdish terrorist in 1998, was accused of being a member of the Red Army faction in Germany. November is an elegy to a distant friend, an essay on the construction of mythic identities, and a commentary on the defunct ideologies of revolution.

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, We Will Live to See These Things or Five Pictures of What May Come to Pass (2007, 47 minutes)
Shot in 2005-06 in Damascus, Syria, We Will Live deals with competing visions of the future. Each section—the chronicle of a building in Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Quran school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew—offers a different perspective on what might happen in a place caught between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.